Suburb #4 Oaks Estate

I was looking forward to visiting Oaks Estate, as Jay and I had previously been on an adventure out there as it used to be one of the only places in ACT that you could buy Aquavit (a Scandinavian spirit that will shock you into reality). I had thought it was really pretty and would be a nice place to live but at the time Jay thought I was a bit nuts (I guess he wasn't that enamoured with a view of Queanbeyan railway station)...so when I saw this article in the Canberra times about it being a potential new property hot spot I was interested to see whether it had changed much. But anyway...

Oaks Estate is (as suggested above) is right next to Queanbeyan and is somewhere where you can stand with one foot in NSW and one in ACT as demonstrated by Jay below in such a low-key way.

Oaks Estate takes its name from "The Oaks" an old farming estate dating back to the 1830s. It is still there but unfortunately you can't see as it as it is private property. There is an interesting local community website if you are interested that can tell you all about the historical features of the suburb. As this website notes, as The Oaks was basically ignored by the federal capital authority as it wasn't part of the "plan" for Canberra - luckily there is quite a lot of heritage left. You can see the heritage listed bus shelter (if you are weird like me and that interest you) and also "Robertson's House" which was built in 1912-13 by construction workers out of all sorts of weird and wonderful materials.

I think Gillespie park with the gazebo is really pretty. The local community vegie garden is also pretty impressive. If  you can ignore the slightly bad smell, a walk down along the Molonglo or Queanbeyan rivers is quite pretty. It looks like a project has started to clean up this river area which would be fantastic.

The bottle shop has currently sold out of Aquavit unfortunately, but the staff are lovely and still have an interesting collection of wine and spirits.

I had to include this additional photo plus because I thought it was cute, and I think confirms my original impression that this would be a nice place to live (assuming you had a car).

And just an extra photo showing the view over to NSW...